LinksLinksBy the Best Definition, the Poverty Rate Should Be TripledPaul Buchheit: Poverty should not be defined simply by the number of dollars that an American can scrape together each year ... The World Bank defines poverty as "pronounced deprivation in well-being," not only of material needs but also of health and education and security and public voice and the "opportunity to better one's life" and the "capability of the individual to function in society." ... Census data in 2011 showed that half of Americans were in or near poverty. ... Poverty guidelines are dramatically out of touch with reality. Developed in the 1960s, they were based on the cost of food, which used to be a much greater part of the typical household budget. ... Debt causes depression, migraines, ulcers, high blood pressure, disrupted sleep, even heart attacks. That is deprivation of well-being. That is poverty of both body and mind...[ Visit Website ]Jan 8, 2019, 11:51am

LinksWhat if Osama bin Laden Had Legitimate Grievances? Maj. Danny Sjursen: You’re not supposed to utter these words, but what the heck: Osama bin Laden had a point. ... 1. Bin Laden objected to the presence of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia specifically and across the region more generally, due to their proximity to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Furthermore, bin Laden criticized the U.S. backing of Saudi Arabia’s despotic royal regime. ... 2. The al-Qaida chief lamented the starvation blockade that the West—led by Washington—imposed on Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. ... the well-reported deaths of some 500,000 Iraqi children, victims of the sanctions during that period, are what motivated bin Laden’s concern. ... 3. Bin Laden, like many global Muslims, felt sympathy for the generations-long plight of the occupied Palestinians and abhorred America’s one-sided support for Israel’s military and governing apparatus...[ Visit Website ]Dec 4, 2018, 4:36pm

LinksCapitalism Is Beyond Saving, and America Is Living ProofJacob Bacharach: Policies that fail in the same way over and over are not failing. Someone is lying about their intent. ... The war in Iraq didn’t fail to bring democracy to the Middle East; it smashed an intransigent sometimes-ally in the region, and deliberately weakened and destabilized a group of countries whose control of, and access to, immense oil reserves was of strategic American interest. ... Real wage growth has been nonexistent in the United States for more than 30 years. ... Capitalism isn’t broken; it’s working precisely as it’s supposed to: generating surpluses and giving all of them to a small ownership class. ... The barbarians aren’t at the gates. They’re already here in the boardrooms; they’ve been here all along...[ Visit Website ]Sep 1, 2018, 11:34am

LinksNagasaki JourneyOn August 10, 1945 , the day after the bombing of Nagasaki, Yosuke Yamahata began to photograph the devastation. His companions on the journey were a painter, Eiji Yamada, and a writer, Jun Higashi. (Reprinted from previous years.)[ Visit Website ]Aug 9, 2018, 4:17pm

LinksScars of HiroshimaVijay Prashad: At the outskirts of Tokyo, beyond light manufacturing plants and small farms, sits an incongruous set of buildings. There is a traditional Japanese veranda near an attractive house, besides which sits a large blue building. In that building, on two floors, hang the soul of Japan – the paintings by Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki that are collectively called the Hiroshima Panels. ... ‘We carried the injured, cremated the dead, searched for food and water, made roofs of scorched tin sheets,’ ... Committed to pacifism and socialism, the Marukis spent the rest of their life documenting the horrors of war and the great human struggle to end suffering. ... ‘One Atomic Bomb’, they wrote, ‘in one instant caused the deaths of more people than we could ever portray’...[ Visit Website ]Aug 9, 2018, 4:00pm

LinksHiroshima: the Crime That Keeps on Paying, But Beware the ReckoningDiana Johnstone: The decision to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a political not a military decision. The targets were not military, the effects were not military. The attacks were carried out against the wishes of all major military leaders ... All top U.S. leaders knew that Japan was defeated and was seeking to surrender ... The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki plunged the United States leadership into a moral sleep from which it has yet to awaken...[ Visit Website ]Aug 5, 2018, 11:09am

LinksMy Advice for High School Graduates: Learn a TradeChuck Collins: Not only is our economy suffering for lack of skilled workers, but also a huge number of workers are unhappy and earning below their financial potential. ... There are legions of depressed Dilberts out there in cubicle land, sitting in front of computer screens, wondering who will be laid off next. And there are millions of young people sitting in college classrooms dreaming of being somewhere else. ... Princeton economist Alan Blinder says the job market of the future won’t be divided between people with college degrees and those without, but between work that can be outsourced and work that can’t. “You can’t hammer a nail over the internet,” he observed. “Nor can you fix a car transmission, rewire a house, install solar panels, or give a patient an injection.”...[ Visit Website ]May 5, 2018, 10:00am

Links10 American Myths “Refutiated”*Terry Simons:The Myth: That the “liberal media” includes every media outlet other than FOX. ... Moderate news organizations such as The New York Times, MSNBC and the Sunday morning news talk shows are all centrist. These media are controlled by large U.S. corporations. Multi-national corporations are not liberal, but rather thrive on conservative economic and social orders to control and maintain the status quo. ... The Myth: That America’s two-party system is a highly developed representative form of government and a shining beacon of “democracy at work.” ... The truth is that the U.S. Congress and the Presidency are controlled by the narrow interests of the elites, especially the big-business status quo...[ Visit Website ]Mar 18, 2018, 3:08pm

LinksThe Illusion of War Without CasualtiesNicolas J.S. Davies:America’s wars in the post-9/11 era have been characterized by relatively low U.S. casualties, but that does not mean that they are any less violent than previous wars ... In the past 16 years, the U.S. has invaded, occupied and dropped 200,000 bombs and missiles on seven countries, but it has lost only 6,939 American troops killed and 50,000 wounded in these wars. ... Our post-2001 wars have probably killed between 2 and 5 million people. ... America’s deluded leaders know nothing of diplomacy beyond bullying and brinksmanship. As they brainwash themselves and the public with the illusion of war without casualties, they will keep killing, destroying and risking our future until we stop them – or until they stop us and everything else... [ Visit Website ]Mar 10, 2018, 10:48am

LinksWomen Could Be the Undoing of Donald TrumpThe Economist:Many of the cultural clashes the president has engineered work to his advantage. Not this one ... Amid the rancour of American politics, the large number of first-time women candidates the Democrats will field is unequivocally positive. Around 400 women, mostly Democrats, are planning to run for the House, at least 50 for the Senate and 79 for governor. That is far more than have previously stood for any of those offices. At state and local levels, the picture is the same. In 2015 and 2016 around 900 women consulted Emily’s List about standing for office; since Mr Trump’s election, over 26,000 have...[ Visit Website ]Feb 20, 2018, 3:04pm

LinksThe Net’s Good Old Boys: Hacking the ArpanetGeoff Dutton: It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time before the Internet, a time when computers took up more space than the acolytes who tended to their needs. ... DoD’s Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) had funded the network to develop a prototype military communications system. They let scientists play with it and observed what they were up to ... Soon it became evident that strangers were snooping around the Net ... Today as perhaps then the underlying task of the Internet is surveillance, but nobody who does it admits to it or that maximizing ad revenues is the main concern of corporate news media is. ... The Internet wasn’t designed to be secure; quite the opposite, it is rife with holes in its backdoor code and protocols deliberately put there for reasons that might or might not have to do with government surveillance....[ Visit Website ]Jan 4, 2018, 11:21am

LinksMilitary, CIA Leaders May Be Investigated for War Crimes Marjorie Cohn: On Nov. 3, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) informed the court’s Pre-Trial Chamber, “[T]here is a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in connection with the armed conflict in Afghanistan.” ... In what Amnesty International’s Solomon Sacco called a “seminal moment for the ICC,” Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda asked the court for authorization to commence an investigation that would focus on U.S. military and CIA leaders, as well as Taliban and Afghan officials. ... In 2008, ABC News reported that Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet and John Ashcroft met in the White House and micromanaged the torture of terrorism suspects by approving specific torture techniques such as waterboarding...[ Visit Website ]Nov 20, 2017, 10:57am

LinksRacial Wedge Politics Invented In Colonial AmericaGary Olson: Ninety percent of the colonial population of Virginia consisted of Africans, some of them enslaved and others indentured servants, and poor European tenants and laborers. ... A small army of poor (black) Africans and poor (white) English frontiersmen realized they were getting their asses whupped by the landed aristocracy. This ragtag militia, led by the Englishman-turned-rebel, Nathaniel Bacon, attacked the royal English government and burned Jamestown to the ground ... Recognizing that another insurrection was possible and might spread, the terrified ruling circle of planters needed a scheme. Their great trick was to drive a wedge between white and black workers.... there is one minority that is dangerous to most Americans. It's the wealthy, privileged elite that rules over everyone else, those who own and benefit from our deeply dysfunctional economic system....[ Visit Website ]Nov 10, 2017, 11:28am

LinksThe Public Bank Option: Safer, Local, and Half the CostEllen Brown: A UK study published on October 27, 2017 reported that the majority of politicians do not know where money comes from. ... In a 2014 article the Bank of England pointed out that “whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.” ... Public sector banks, while rare in the US, are common in other countries; and recent studies have shown that they are actually more profitable, safer, less corrupt, and more accountable overall than private banks. ... This is particularly true of the Bank of North Dakota, currently the only publicly-owned depository bank in the US....[ Visit Website ]Nov 6, 2017, 12:18pm

LinksBalfour Declaration: How Britain broke its Feeble Promise to the PalestiniansJonathan Cook: The Balfour Declaration is an embarrassing reminder that a Jewish state was the fruit of a transparently colonial project. ... By the time Britain departed Palestine in 1948, it had overseen three decades in which the Zionists were allowed to develop the institutions of statehood: a government-in-waiting, the Jewish Agency; a proto-army in the Haganah; and a land and settlement division known as the Jewish National Fund. ... By contrast, any signs of Palestinian nationalism, let alone nation-building, were ruthlessly crushed...[ Visit Website ]Oct 30, 2017, 4:03pm